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Sue Vickerman has an eye for intricate detail, and is
as sharp as the beak of a razor bill. There appears this
unquenchable thirst to discover, to feel, to realise moments that
are emotionally precise. The subjects are wide-ranging, from older
women to black-backed gulls, from B & Q to an English Cathedral.
The opening poem cements the tone, watching seabirds in a rocky cove
where the shag is ‘spiked’ and ‘rakish’, as opposed the herring
gulls that are ‘laddish, on ledges’. The poem moves to juxtapose a
relationship to the current happenings on the shore, concluding with
the shag being less refined than a cormorant, but confident;
something sexual: ‘he winks, shows me his profile, flexing his
seaweed wings.’
Indeed, her seabird observations are pivotal, and
her imagery fresh as a northerly breeze, giving a binocular view on
cliffs and coastal territory: ‘bladder-wrack stretches skin-tight on
the knees of boulders’, ‘a keen wind sliced the cake edge of
Scotland’. In Waiting for Puffins: ‘There are no bright, calypso
beaks, jolly as plastic’. And once again the human aspect in The
Fulmar: ‘You only laughed, loving his bulk; his lecherous
bull-necked look’.
She seems to rise above it all, with empathy and honesty, reeling at
the deficiencies, at times unsuitability, of the unknowing world
around her:
I crept into the dark cleft of your chin
like a cave, out of sight, afraid,
narrowing my perspective to your profile.
This is what makes the poems tick, a direct approach with an ability
to draw the reader into scenes of uncertainty – not so much
exceptional occasions, but these everyday tapestries, where she
wrings out buckets of feeling.
But be prepared for comic antics. Take for instance, Apeshit, where
two friends (plus all the other kids in the housing estate) watch
their mothers tearing lumps from each other on the garden path. Or
the middle section of Chapel People, where a new age traveller
gatecrashes the pulpit during a service:
Shit-matted sheep tails
dangled from his scalp
and a studded belt
clung to his whippet loins.
He was stoned and grinning,
his DM’s laced with string…’
Be it Toxteth or the Tyne, Richmond upon Thames or Aberdeen, the
Shanghai Hilton and Berlin; the narratives will lead to a place
whose surface is rarely seen.
Douglas W. Gray
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